The Dream Keeper's Gift
A story of loss, literature, and the dream that refused to die
Officer Jack Murray slipped off his night jacket and curled it into a pillow beneath the young girl’s head.
Freeway traffic beyond the center divider sent gusts of air and occasional pebbles in their direction. The girl’s delicate, dolphin earrings swayed back and forth with the breeze.
He figured she was about sixteen years old.
Shock set in, but her light blue eyes gazed at him and she whispered, “I’m cold, so very cold.” He quickly fetched the wool blanket in the back of his patrol vehicle and laid it over the girl.
“You’re in shock, but don’t worry, I’ve got you,” Jack said, holding her slender hand.
He asked her name, but she didn’t reply. Her damaged body sank slightly, and as she exhaled something deep within her seemed to loosen and evaporate.
“Hold on, help is on the way,” he said.
Jack gently swept the girl’s blonde bangs away from her eyes. She became very still, like a fragile bird after striking a window. Her pretty blue eyes lost their luster, the pupils fixed and unreactive, frozen in whatever final thoughts crossed the landscape of her mind.
Jack bowed his head, and something felt caught in his throat. He was still holding the girl’s limp hand, her glossy fingernail polish reflecting the amber lights of his patrol vehicle.
He looked down the roadway at the contorted wreckage of the pickup truck, still smoking and leaking oil onto the hard pavement. Empty beer bottles thrown from the truck bed littered the asphalt. It was an ugly, tragic, disturbing scene.
Emergency personnel arrived to assist. A young firefighter checking the edge of the roadway yelled and waved to his colleagues.
He had found the boy.
Like the girl, the boy had been ejected from the cab of the truck. His body came to rest in a ravine just off the roadway, entangled like a battered rag doll on a barbed wire fence. His glowing cell phone lay ten feet away.
The unfinished text message to the boy’s mother read, “Be home soon, gotta drop off Sarah and...”
The coroner’s office was summoned, and thankfully, they handled the death notifications.
Jack was grateful to be spared the task. He knocked on countless doors over the years, bearing news no one wants to receive. Some screamed, others collapsed in his arms. Countless uniform shirts soaked with the tears of the grief-stricken. Their anguished faces sometimes come to him in dreams.
Ghosts caught between this world and the next.
Jack returned to the police department, grabbed a coffee, and sat in the squad room to work on reports. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the girl’s dolphin earrings swinging in the breeze.
He didn’t realize he was weeping until the Sergeant came into the room and said, “Hey buddy, are you alright?” Only then did Jack feel the moisture on his cheeks.
He wiped his face with his shirt sleeve and said, “I’m just tired.”
Later that night shift, Jack drove to Vine Hill School.
Vandals had been spraying graffiti behind the school gym, so increased security checks made sense. But really, the security checks were an excuse for Jack to get out of his patrol vehicle, stretch his legs, and take in the cool night air.
He radioed dispatch his location and walked the entire perimeter of the school. No vandals anywhere in sight, just a raccoon near the dumpster and the song of crickets filling the rolling fields adjacent to the school.
He gazed at the playground where Jimmy King and his goons used to bully him. A chubby and bespectacled boy, Jack was a favorite target back then. And the fact that Jack loved poetry and got good grades didn’t help. They called him “Teacher’s Pet” and “Miss Emily Dickinson.”
When the bullying got worse and he came home with a black eye and split lip, Jack’s dad sat him down in the kitchen.
“Son, it’s time I teach you how to fight. And we’re going to start you on a fitness program. If you don’t toughen up, they’ll never leave you alone. Also, you’ve gotta stop all the poetry nonsense. Time to man up.”
And so it began.
His father had been a drill sergeant in the Marine Corps, and he knew how to fight. He also knew how to get fit, and Jack found himself enduring a kind of boot camp at home. Running, lifting, climbing, and boxing.
“He’s a sensitive boy,” his mother sometimes argued. “He likes poetry and art. He has great aptitude in those areas. Don’t kill that part of his spirit.” But his father would have none of it. “The boy needs to become a man, not a damn poet!”
Jack climbed over the low fence and waded through tall grass until he reached his favorite clearing, with a view of Santos pond far below. The beauty and peace of the area always calmed him. He sat in the clearing, gazing at Santos pond, where he used to fish as a boy with his father.
Jack, like most boys, wanted to please his father.
Maybe that’s why Jack became a cop. To prove to his Dad that he was a real man. And indeed, Jack learned how to handle himself, having attained a blackbelt in jujitsu. He also hit the gym daily and maintained a high level of physical fitness. He went to college and got a degree in English, perhaps to fan the smoldering embers of his love for literature and poetry. But the shadow of his father’s will always eclipsed what little creative light remained in his heart. Thus, to continue pleasing his father, Jack joined the police department.
That was twenty years ago.
Both of Jack’s parents are gone now. An only child, he inherited and still lives in the old family home. He still trains in jujitsu and works out regularly.
But muscles and fighting skills are insufficient armor against the emotional wounds of life. A long career in policing exposed Jack to much death, violence, and human suffering.
Their cumulative effects were eating away at his soul, and so he knew what he had to do.
On his days off, Jack began visiting the local library.
Some of his colleagues enjoyed golf and hitting the local brewery, but such pursuits didn’t interest Jack. He liked the quiet serenity of the library, and the attached coffee shop was great for enjoying a latte while reading.
Jack fell in love with the classics section of the library and started checking out books by his favorite novelists and poets. “Sorry, Dad,” he whispered to himself one afternoon at the library. “I know you meant well. I tried it your way for twenty years, but I have some healing to do now.”
Lucy, one of the young librarians Jack got to know, complimented him on the diverse collection of works he was checking out.
“Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, The Brontë sisters, Dickinson, Whitman. Good Lord, you’re not messing around,” Lucy said with a chuckle.
“Well, I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff in my law enforcement career. So I’m trying to cleanse my palate, so to speak,” Jack said.
“Sure, I get it. You’re stealing a page from Pablo,” Lucy said.
“Stealing a page from Pablo?” Jack said, confused.
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. That’s what Pablo Picasso said. It’s what you’re doing. Healing your soul with art, as in great literature.” With that, Lucy stamped return dates on the cards in each book. “Knock yourself out,” she said with a smile.
Lucy was Jack’s favorite librarian.
Back at work, late in his patrol shift, a death call came in from Oak Tree Estates, the only assisted living community in this small mountain town where Jack has lived his entire life.
Jack arrived and contacted Stephany at the front desk. He knew her from high school. Like him, she never found her way to distant horizons.
“Hi Jack, sorry to call you so soon after last month’s incident.”
“No worries, Stephany.”
“It’s Bill Johnson, in Room 71. Our night shift med cart guy, Phillip, went to give him his pills. Found him dead. Johnson had a DNR on file. He had emphysema and was probably tired of trying to breathe all the time. He’d just seen the oncologist last week, so it’s an attended death. Once your office clears everything with the Coroner, we’ll call his next of kin—a son, I think. Anyway, Phillip is waiting for you at the room.”
“Thanks, Stephany. Say, how is Doug? You two still on to get married this summer?”
Stephany looked down at the paperwork on her desk, and then back at Jack. A touch of sorrow darkened her expression.
“I’d rather not talk about it right now, if that’s okay, Jack.”
“Oh, sure Stephany, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to step in it.”
“It’s okay. Stuff happens, right? I mean, you think you know someone, but maybe you never really do.” She looked down again, and gently bit her lower lip.
“It’ll be okay, Stephany. Hang in there.”
Jack strolled through the quiet corridors of Oak Tree Estates, past all the numbered rooms, with glass shadow boxes displayed beside the doors, housing photos of residents and their loved ones. Beautiful landscape and still life paintings adorned the hallways, and Jack thought the artwork did much to enliven this place that some call “God’s waiting room.”
Jack reached Room 71 and there was Phillip, standing by in an ill-fitting Oak Tree Estates uniform. Phillip said hello and provided his statement for Jack’s report.
“He was a cool dude,” Phillip said.
“How so?”
“The dude always dressed elegantly, and he constantly wrote stuff in his leather journals with one of those old fountain pens. We find his handwritten poems and little notes stuffed in books and underneath pillows everywhere. He read tons of books, always going to the library, and he kept telling me to go back to school. ‘Phillip, don’t’ miss out like I did,’ he used to say. ‘Chase those dreams, my boy.’ Yep, that’s what he always said.” Phillip smiled at the memory of it.
“What did he mean by not missing out like he did?” Jack said.
“Mr. Johnson had been a trucker. That was his profession. His family never had money for college, and I guess his dream was to become a writer someday. You know, move and inspire people with his words,” Phillip explained.
“Sounds like he was a fine gentleman. Sorry about his loss,” Jack said.
“I know you got to take photos and do your investigative stuff, so just call the front desk if you need anything. I have to get back to my rounds.”
“Thanks, Phillip.”
Jack opened the door and stepped into Bill Johnson’s apartment.
Everything inside was immaculate. Tasteful furniture, shelves of neatly lined books, journals, and beautiful monochromatic photographs in black frames graced several of the walls.
Jack stepped into the bedroom where Johnson’s body, dressed in navy blue pajamas, lay motionless in bed. A pair of reading glasses and a W. B. Yeats book of poetry lay beside the old man’s right hand on the bed covers.
Jack peeked at the open page of the poetry book and recognized the poem: “Sailing to Byzantium.”
He randomly selected the third stanza of the poem and read it aloud:
“O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.”
Jack wondered if, like the speaker in the poem, he’d ever find sages of wisdom and divine inspiration to guide him to a kind of immortality through art and literature. What would be his “artifice of eternity?” Would he ever create his own enduring, immortal work of art? Like a novel of his own, or a book of moving poetry.
It was late, he was tired, and he knew his mind was drifting into an esoteric realm. Time to forget about artistic immortality and return to Earth.
He took photographs and measurements for his police report.
The bureau across from the bed held a dozen or more photographs of Bill Johnson and his family. Black and white wedding photos, a photo of Johnson behind the wheel of a big rig, and more recent color photos with perhaps his grandchildren. But the best photo showed Johnson sitting in a high-backed leather chair, reading a thick novel, with a broad smile.
“You definitely found your passion in life,” Jack said as he gazed at the photo.
Just then, his handheld radio chirped, and the dispatcher informed Jack that the Coroner cleared the case as an attended death. The Neptune Society had been notified and were on their way.
Jack phoned Stephany at the front desk to tell her he was all done and just waiting for the Neptune Society people to show up. Thirty minutes later, a white van arrived at Oak Tree Estates, and the Neptune Society reps wheeled in a stretcher. Stephany phoned Phillip to lead them back to Room 71 where Jack greeted the entourage.
Johnson’s body was efficiently tucked into a black body bag, zipped shut, and taken away on the stretcher. Phillip locked up and secured the apartment until Johnson’s son could come later in the day to go through everything and make arrangements to clear out the apartment.
Just like that, an old trucker who dreamed of becoming a writer ceased to exist. But as Jack would discover, sometimes the dead leave behind echoes of who they were.
Gifts that can change the trajectory of people’s lives.
A week passed and Jack was back at the library on his days off.
He dropped some books with Lucy at the front desk, adjusted the leather satchel he bought to carry his books, journals, and Parker fountain pen (inspired by the many fine pens Jack noticed atop the writing desk in Mr. Johnson’s apartment), and strolled to the literature and poetry section in the back of the library.
Jack perused the poetry books and found a random volume by Langston Hughes titled, “The Dream Keeper and Other Poems.” He slipped it off the shelf, strolled back to his favorite library chair, and settled in to enjoy the poetry.
He noticed a beige color bookmark between some pages, and opened it to a poem titled, “Dreams.”
Jack read the poem softly to himself:
“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.”
Jack thought about his own dreams. About his love for writing, literature, and poetry. And then he looked closely at the beige bookmark he found within the Langston Hughes book. The front side of the bookmark bore the neatly printed initials B. J., and on the back side in beautifully handwritten fountain pen ink were the words:
My dear reader,
I am an aged man, a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, who dreamed of becoming a writer, but never found a path to higher education. And so I contented myself with reading the works of great authors and poets. If you are like me, seduced by the artifice of eternity, then find a way to higher education. Chase your literary dreams, before it’s too late, and you shuffle off your mortal coil.
Artfully yours,
Bill Johnson
Jack sat in stunned silence. And then, he remembered Phillip saying that Johnson encouraged him to go back to school. Chase those dreams. And that Johnson left handwritten notes all over the place. Apparently, even at the library.
Jack tucked the serendipitous bookmark into his satchel and brought the Langston Hughes poetry book to Lucy.
“I’d like to check this out,” he said, still overwhelmed by the odds of finding what he found.
“Oh, Jack, I’ve been meaning to give you this flier,” Lucy said. “It’s all about the creative writing MFA program here at the state university. I’m going to enroll this Fall and, well, I guess I thought it might be of interest to you.”
Jack held the flier in his hand.
He thought of his mother, and how she recognized and tried to nurture his creative soul. He thought of the girl with the dolphin earrings, who never got the chance to explore the rest of her life. And he thought of Bill Johnson, who even in death found a way to inspire and encourage others to chase their dreams.
“I’m sorry, Jack. Is everything okay? I didn’t mean to upset you,” Lucy said.
And Jack realized that he was weeping again, but this time, they were tears of joy.
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